Generator-jhipster: Access/Refresh Token Handling for UAA Authentication

[Metavirulent]

• Overview of the request

I want to propose a pull request improving token handling for microservice gateways with authenticationType==='uaa' fixing critical security issues with the current implementation. The proposed changes are:

• store the refresh token along with the access token
• keep the tokens as http-only cookies rather than in the sessionStorage/localStorage (for security reasons, and to enable SSO, s.b.)
• implement a filter in the gateway that automatically sends a refresh_token grant to UAA when the access token is about to expire/expired, seamlessly setting new cookies.

This fixes a number of security and usability problems as described below.

• Motivation for or Use Case

Currently, for authenticationType==='uaa', only the access token is used, the refresh token is discarded. Furthermore, the access token is stored in the localStorage/sessionStorage and thus accessible from within Javascript.

This has the following security problems:

• storing access tokens in a way that they can be retrieved from within Javascript is considered to be insecure (see https://stormpath.com/blog/where-to-store-your-jwts-cookies-vs-html5-web-storage#so-whats-the-difference, https://www.owasp.org/index.php/HTML5_Security_Cheat_Sheet#Local_Storage and https://www.whitehatsec.com/blog/web-storage-security/).
• due to the lack of refresh token handling, access tokens validity must be set to a much longer duration which further aggravates the problem. Normally, access tokens are supposed to be short lived so if they get compromised, the window of attack is fairly small.

For security-sensitive applications that require an external audit, these are show-stoppers.

In addition to these security issues, there are a few additional problems:

• once the access token expires, the user is kicked out of his "session", even if he was active mere seconds ago. This can be quite confusing and isn't very good from a usability point of view. He should only be kicked out if he is inactive for too long and his refresh token expires, not because the access token he obtained quite a while ago suddenly goes poof.
• tokens cannot be shared across gateways. Most microservices will probably feature multiple gateways and they shall all share the same tokens, governed by a central UAA. That way, you could have some kind of SSO across gateways. It's common to assign subdomains to individual apps (like Google does with maps.google.com, accounts.google.com, etc.) and once you are logged in to one of them, you want to reuse that token with the next one. This is currently not possible.

• Browsers and Operating System

n/a

• Related issues

n/a

• Suggest a Fix

I'd prepare a pull request that

• modifies the way UAA gateways authenticate, setting and clearing cookies on the top level domain
• creates a CookieTokenExtractor that can automatically pull tokens from cookies (in addition to standard bearer tokens)
• creates a RefreshTokenFilter that verifies the access token and automatically refreshes it using the refresh token (in a thread-safe manner since browsers often send requests in parallel)
• modifies the gateway's angular/angularjs code for authenticationType==='uaa' to not keep the token in the sessionStorage/localStorage (also removing the interceptor since all the work is done on the server side then)
• modifies UAA so users can control access and refresh token validity via configuration (providing sane defaults like 5min/10days, exact default values tbd)
• proper support of "remember me" which basically controls whether the refresh token cookie shall be persistent or kept for the session only (remember me will be shown on the angularjs UI where it is currently hidden)

The only impact would be that the JS code won't have access to the token anymore, in particular:

• getToken() in auth-jwt.service.js/ts won't be able to return tokens as they will be out of reach. I'm not sure in how far this is a problem, it currently only seems to be used by the websocket tracker AFAIK.
• loginWithToken() in the same file wouldn't be available either but it doesn't seem to be used in microservices.

Let me know what you think.

[jdubois]

• This all makes sense to me, then our UAA master is @xetys so let's wait for his opinion
• There is also an effort under way to integrate Keycloak with JHipster, and what you are doing here looks a lot like what I've heard with Keycloak: how about a common code for both UAA and Keycloak? They should work same. Would you be interested in this?

[cbornet]

An old related discussion : https://github.com/jhipster/generator-jhipster/issues/3405

[cbornet]

This one also: #4278

[Metavirulent]

@cbornet thanks for the links. I see that the XSS vulnerability and other issues have been discussed already, but it's not just about _where_ to store the OAuth2 tokens, but also about _which_ tokens. In a microservice architecture with UAA authentication, the refresh token is returned during the password grant but it is discarded. That puts all the burden on the poor access token which shouldn't even have to be stored persistently nor live nearly as long.

It also means your session duration is hardcoded and being active in the application doesn't prevent the session from expiring. Like I explained above, it also means that you cannot easily share tokens across gateways belonging to the same top level domain.

@jdubois regarding keycloak: it's been a while since I last was looking into it but AFAIK, it has ready-made adapters that do the job for various languages and environments. When it comes to token storage, you get the choice between HTTP sessions and cookies, IIRC. What I didn't like about their cookies back then is that they were not set on the top-level domain making SSO impossible.

Using their adapters would also result in a very keycloak specific solution. I'm proposing a more Spring OAuth2-friendly solution here that works well with all the Spring OAuth2 code the JHipster microservice architecture currently relies upon.

It should theoretically also work for another token infrastructure like keycloak, even though there are a number of different issues to be solved that don't exist with UAA yet, the most prominent being multi-tenancy (or realms in keycloak terms).

I'd start out with making refresh tokens work with UAA first and make sure not to lock it into being too UAA specific so it can be easily adapted later (e.g. by changing the token endpoint URL).

[sdoxsee]

Great ideas. How would you get SSO without a login view on UAA itself? Redirection is key to SSO...or would we provide a login view on UAA now?

[xetys]

@sdoxsee I assume, after doing a password grant authentication, the server stores the token into a cookie, which the browser will add on further requests automatically, while still returning the tokens like before. This cookie, when "HttpOnly" is not accessible over JavaScript, implying there is no need to handle token stuff in the angular client.

In general, I think this is a good step towards a better security and "remember me" function, as it is now. About the "SSO" benefit, this is not that easy. It's not the classical SSO from OAuth2. What @Metavirulent means, is that SSO like experience. Consider all your gateways are on the same hostname and separated via paths. Once you sign on the host "example.com/someGateway/uaa", the cookie is valid for all other gateways, too. So there is no redirection needed.

So, if any help is needed here, let me know!

[jdubois]

Thanks @Metavirulent I have just discussed those Keycloak issues with @bleporini on Friday, and as far as I understand he wanted to do the same thing as you -> any chance that you both could team up on this?

[Metavirulent]

Full keycloak integration is a different beast, as the current UI is also talking to UAA directly, e.g. in Account service. I'd rather limit this issue #5752 to the scope of the missing refresh grant.

I'll make sure that the same mechanism can be used with keycloak by abstracting the token endpoint client so we can hook in a keycloak specific implementation.

I'll also get rid of the limitation that UAA is required during microservice startup as this really impacts availability. Microservices probably cannot talk to each other without UAA being there, but they should still launch properly.

[sdoxsee]

@Metavirulent removing the check for the UAA's public key will mean each service will need to manually configure the key. It's a tradeoff. I prefer the reference but can see why one might not like it.

Any other opinions before we pull it?

[Metavirulent]

@sdoxsee actually, I want each microservice to try fetch the key when it starts but fail gracefully if it cannot, then go fetch it later when needed. Obviously, if UAA continues to be down, then no token check will be possible and thus all requests will be denied, but at least once UAA comes back up, the microservice can be back in action.

On a similar note, it should fetch it again if the verification fails because the key could have been replaced on UAA and we don't want to reboot all services in that case. Maybe we add some kind of time limit to avoid spamming UAA.

[sdoxsee]

Excellent! Even better. I know there's been some work on key-uri config and
key rotation that's progressed since the key lookup was coded in jhipster.
It might help... but maybe not. See
https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/issues/4437 and I'm sure
you're aware of the re-write of oauth2 handling that's under way
https://spring.io/blog/2017/05/11/spring-security-5-0-0-m1#new-support-for-oauth-2-0-and-openid-connect-1-0

Thanks for looking into this.

On Tue, May 16, 2017, 4:15 PM Markus Öllinger [e-mail]
wrote:

@sdoxsee https://github.com/sdoxsee actually, I want each microservice
to try fetch the key when it starts but fail gracefully if it cannot, then
go fetch it later when needed. Obviously, if UAA continues to be down, then
no token check will be possible and thus all requests will be denied, but
at least once UAA comes back up, the microservice can be back in action.

On a similar note, it should fetch it again if the verification fails
because the key could have been replaced on UAA and we don't want to reboot
all services in that case. Maybe we add some kind of time limit to avoid
spamming UAA.

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[Metavirulent]

I need a bit of help on how to get travis run again. A recent commit changed yo jhipster to jhipster in travis/scripts/02-generate-project.sh and now travis won't work on my machine anymore.

What am I missing?

[pascalgrimaud]

@Metavirulent :
We added JHipster CLI.
See https://github.com/jhipster/generator-jhipster/pull/5726 and https://github.com/jhipster/generator-jhipster/issues/5747

[Metavirulent]

@pascalgrimaud thanks, I already though so. This is completely broken on my machine. I tried it with yarn on a Mac and on Windows but to no avail. I can't even do a yarn link on my generator-jhipster folder anymore without getting an EPERM: operation not permitted, symlink .... On Windows this may have to do with me not having admin rights.

I don't have time to figure out why this is broken so I'll just insert the yo manually for now and hope this gets sorted out before release (or becomes optional, as it doesn't seem to be stable for all the different evnironments out there).

[deepu105]

Could you give some more info like stack trace etc? Coz it looks like you
dont have install rights. Doesn npm i -g generator-jhipster work for you?

On Thu, 18 May 2017, 10:10 am Markus Öllinger, [e-mail]
wrote:

@pascalgrimaud https://github.com/pascalgrimaud thanks, I already
though so. This is completely broken on my machine. I tried it with yarn on
a Mac and on Windows but to no avail. I can't even do a yarn link on my
generator-jhipster folder anymore without getting an EPERM: operation not
permitted, symlink .... On Windows this may have to do with me not having
admin rights.

I don't have time to figure out why this is broken so I'll just insert the
yo manually for now and hope this gets sorted out before release (or
becomes optional, as it doesn't seem to be stable for all the different
evnironments out there).

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[deepu105]

Also did you follow the instructions to set it up? You need to run npm i -g on the generator-jhipster folder first and then do npm link

On Thu, 18 May 2017, 11:12 am Deepu K Sasidharan, <
[email protected]> wrote:

Could you give some more info like stack trace etc? Coz it looks like you
dont have install rights. Doesn npm i -g generator-jhipster work for you?

On Thu, 18 May 2017, 10:10 am Markus Öllinger, [e-mail]
wrote:

@pascalgrimaud https://github.com/pascalgrimaud thanks, I already
though so. This is completely broken on my machine. I tried it with yarn on
a Mac and on Windows but to no avail. I can't even do a yarn link on my
generator-jhipster folder anymore without getting an EPERM: operation
not permitted, symlink .... On Windows this may have to do with me not
having admin rights.

I don't have time to figure out why this is broken so I'll just insert
the yo manually for now and hope this gets sorted out before release (or
becomes optional, as it doesn't seem to be stable for all the different
evnironments out there).

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[Metavirulent]

Everything used to work until I pulled the changes. Here's the debug output of npm i -g.

npm-debug.zip

If I try the same with yarn, then no error shows up but it says tabtab:commands User shell undefined not supported, skipping completion install +0ms. yarn-error.zip

This is all on Windows, I don't have access to my Mac right now.

[deepu105]

Ok let me check. I think its a windows specific issue. This shouldn't
happen on a unix like env

On Thu, 18 May 2017, 12:51 pm Markus Öllinger, [e-mail]
wrote:

Everything used to work until I pulled the changes. Here's the debug
output of npm i -g.

npm-debug.zip
https://github.com/jhipster/generator-jhipster/files/1010616/npm-debug.zip

If I try the same with yarn, then no error shows up but it says tabtab:commands
User shell undefined not supported, skipping completion install +0ms.

This is all on Windows, I don't have access to my Mac right now.

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[Metavirulent]

Not sure. Here's the result of npm i -g on my Mac.

npm-debug.log.zip

[ThomasWilhelmUR]

In response to @jdubois top-most answer ("There is also an effort under way to integrate Keycloak with JHipster [...]"):

We are currently using Keycloak with JHipster. We scaffolded the whole architecture using a UAA-based setup (UAA + Services + Gateway + Console etc.). Afterwards we (or rather my colleague) removed the UAA and rewired the gateway to use Keycloak's openID endpoints (and consequently tokens).

In order to know where to start and how to get it running, I really dug deep into the JHipster code. Our progress was a little bit messy but when it clicked it was "easy" - thanks to well written code and good documentation on your part.

I cannot speak to the quality of our solution but if @xetys or the others in this thread are interested, I can share the changes and go into details. (We could PR this, but I would need some guidance there).

greetings

[xetys]

hey,

my big aim with UAA was to build a most compatible solution, so all mechanisms are built using OAuth 2.0 protocol. So I am really sure, there should be no problems of run a keycloak instance instead of UAA. The only part is, you either need some changes on the UI in favor of skipping the Account pages, as they are managed by keycloak, or doing something like "User Profile Service" which aggregates over the user view from keycloak to fit into the existing APIs. However it would be cool for me to see a working setup. A good working demo setup is enough for me, to make a keycloak PR to JHipster, if this appreciated so much.

Addressing the rest of the discussion, I'm happy to see any progress.
Especially I want to get rid of the UAA requirement on boot up. We could use the same mechanism, as we currently use to share the secret key of JWT. We can do the same thing to the public key, and that would make thinks a lot easier. Alternatively, we could look how to use Vault, Lemur or other secret sharing systems to achieve this, as this is a security question, and especially for our JWT secret key (which is symmetric, so I really dislike that fact), which can be used to create valid JWT. Both, basic auth for cloud config, or token endpoint exposure are too unsafe for thus purpose.

So if @Metavirulent is stuck on any part, let me know.

[Metavirulent]

Things look pretty good, here's a quick overview of the improvements I've implemented:

• access and refresh tokens are now kept as http-only cookies, cookies are set on the top-level domain and thus valid for subdomains.
• access tokens are automatically and transparently refreshed by gateways before they expire (via refresh tokens).
• proper "remember me" handling with configurable duration.
• sessions can now expire after a configurable amount of inactivity (if remember me was not checked), this is a common security requirement. On the other hand, they no longer suddenly expire unexpectedly when tokens expire.
• the public key used to verify JWT tokens is fetched at startup, but failure to do so won't terminate the microservice anymore.
• the public key is fetched again if verification fails and after a configurable TTL, so you are safe to replace the key pair without having to restart all microservices.
• the keystore used to sign JWT tokens on the UAA is now configurable so it's easier to change it in prod (which is a must).
• the web_app OAuth2 client now has a proper password, the password is no longer needed by the angular client, so it won't show up there.
• UAA-specific OAuth2 token endpoints (for password and refresh grants) as well as the SignatureVerifier are now hidden by interfaces, so we can swap UAA implementations by others (e.g. keycloak).
• there's a rudimentary keycloak proof of concept that can do JWT token verification and the password/refresh_token grants if keycloak is configured properly. It's not a fully working solution as the other calls the angular client makes, esp. the one to AccountResource still need to be replaced, but it shows that the OAuth2 stuff is working.

It's quite a bit of code but I think things are better now. I'll give it a few more tests and then send the PR. There's still more we could do security-wise, there's no real CSRF protection, no protection vs. click-jacking and no content-security-policy to name a few, but that'd probably for another PR.

[ghost]

So when access token expire, and we are asking for new one then we should send new refresh token too ?
Or keep refresh token until he expire ?

I mean configuration like that
```@Bean
@Primary
public DefaultTokenServices tokenServices() {
DefaultTokenServices defaultTokenServices = new DefaultTokenServices();
defaultTokenServices.setTokenStore(tokenStore());
defaultTokenServices.setSupportRefreshToken(true);
defaultTokenServices.setReuseRefreshToken(false); //return new refresh token ?
}

[Metavirulent]

@lukasw44 good point. Refresh tokens won't be reused because they now get a standard "iat" claim holding the UTC timestamp in seconds when they have been created. This is used for session inactivity timeout. If we reuse the refresh tokens, then you'll eventually run into the timeout even though you have been active.

If you don't plan to use session inactivity timeout, then reuse is possible but by default, UAA will be configured to create a new refresh token.

[evelknievel]

I like the idea of using keycloak integration

[rosefirefish]

Um...I think my question may relevant to this one...I want to set the expire time for the token on the uaa architect, how can I do it? Now, the token just keep working without need of refresh, one can get access to login page as long as the browser tab is open...
I have UAA server with jhipster version 4.6.2, and gateway server with version 4.6.2 too. I tried to read the 'UaaConfiguration.java', didn't find 'AccessTokenValiditySeconds' setting in it... if I manually add it using .accessTokenValiditySeconds(jHipsterProperties.getSecurity().getAuthentication().getOauth().getTokenValidityInSeconds())
it will work as described in this issue, refresh will not update the token validity, so, one could get kicked out any time during operation.

Can anybody tell me, if this will get updated in later version of jHipster UAA, or, am I doing something wrong?

[Metavirulent]

I'm currently on vacation in le Var (been evacuated from wood fire). I'll look into it as soon as I'll be vack.

[deepu105]

PR #5812 merged